A Homegrown Apple in China?

Last Wednesday, news broke that Hugo Barra, the vice president of Android product management for Google, would be joining a Chinese phone maker, Xiaomi, to spearhead the company’s international expansion. Hiring the American-educated, Portuguese-speaking Barra, one of the public faces of Google’s incredibly successful mobile operating system, which is now running on over a billion devices, was a significant achievement for the Beijing-based startup. But it was not the three-year-old company’s first victory over a Western technology giant. Though little known outside China, Xiaomi has already managed to outsell Apple in the world’s largest phone market, earning a valuation of over ten billion dollars.

Xiaomi followed Barra’s hiring by revealing on Thursday the true scope of its ambitions: in addition to the latest model of its successful MiPhone, the MiPhone 3, it introduced its first televison, the MiTV, a forty-seven-inch, 3-D smart television that costs less than five hundred dollars.

Xiaomi has been criticized as something of an Apple knockoff. Its iconoclastic founder, Jun Lei, wears an outfit consisting of a black turtleneck and jeans, and has been referred to as the “counterfeit Jobs.” He does not discourage the comparison; Lei is a self-professed Jobs acolyte who read Steve Jobs’s biography in his first year of college. His fascination with Jobs and the company’s strategy has occasioned heated debates in American media over Xiaomi’s emulation of Apple. For instance, before the introduction of the MiPhone 3, its most advanced phone was the “MiPhone 2S,” whose brand scheme closely resembles that of Apple’s iPhone 4S and presumed follow-up, the 5S. And the Xiaomi phones’ software, a custom version of Google’s Android system, is said to closely resemble the iOS software on Apple’s mobile devices.

But the forty-three-year-old entrepreneur has not been shy in pointing out what he views as the shortcomings of Apple. “Apple is very conceited,” Lei told the New York Times last year. “Their attitude is, ‘I don’t need any feedback.”’ Xiaomi, in contrast, is known in part for offering updates to its phones’ software every Friday; it encourages engineers to speak directly to its customers for feedback. The conclusion he draws about his own company brims with confidence, if not a little presumption: “We’re making the mobile phone like the PC, and this is a totally new idea,” Lei said recently, with no apparent irony. “We’re doing things other companies haven’t done before.” And while some see Xiaomi products as yet another aspirational knockoff of an essentially Western innovation, others have applauded the masterfulness of the Chinese appropriation.

Though Apple and Samsung—currently the phone maker with the most success in China, with nearly twenty per cent of the market—might contest the originality of Xiaomi’s vision, they cannot deny Xiaomi’s distinct price advantage: while the flagship MiPhone 3 is just under three hundred and fifty dollars, the company’s extremely popular Hongmi is just a hundred and thirty dollars. This is a fraction of the cost of the nearly eight-hundred-dollar iPhone 5 or the nearly five-hundred-dollar Samsung Galaxy. It practically vanishes from store shelves whenever it appears.

But Xiaomi’s affordability is only one factor that has drawn such a loyal fan base among China’s youth; another is that the company is the embodiment of the new, rising China. For China’s so-called netizens, the poaching of a prominent Western talent is as much about attaining global visibility and respect as it is about acquiring resources. “Here’s some howl-inducing news,” a business newspaper posted on Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging service that is similar to Twitter. “Xiaomi has finally found an son-in-law; he’s foreign but he’ll be moving to China.” Barra’s role is as symbolic as it is anything else: Xiaomi now has the clout to acquire a Western ambassador for the new face and direction of a company helmed by a Chinese patriarch.

Xiaomi’s name, which translates literally as Millet, comes from a nationalistic slogan popularized during the Sino-Japanese War, in which the Chinese were clearly the underdogs: “We may only have millet and backward rifles while you have your buttered bread and cannons!” The implication was clear: the Chinese may not yet have the might, but we will put up a damn good fight—and win. Shortly after the news of Barra’s hiring broke, a young blogger chirped, “Samsung is done!!! Apple is done!!! 2013, it’s the year of the Millet.”

Whether Xiaomi attracts the same attention on the global stage, catering to populations with markedly different priorities, is another matter—and one Jun Lei presumably hopes to tackle with his newest recruit.